OnlyOffice. A free and open office suite for education

Last updated on February 17, 2025

If you're looking for an open source alternative to Microsoft Office or Google, the tools built into the OnlyOffice solution are an option to take a close look at. This free, multiplatform office suite is full of qualities.

Originally designed for teamwork, OnlyOffice has evolved into a complete open source office suite with several million users worldwide. The French version has been adopted by many educational institutions. Entirely in French, the suite allows, among other things, teamwork. It provides an excellent interface for text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations ensuring compatibility with major file formats.

More and more educational institutions are turning to open solutions to organise collaboration between students and faculty while ensuring the security and confidentiality of personal and scientific data.

To meet these needs, ONLYOFFICE provides several solutions, including the self-hosted office suite, and productivity tools. Schools and universities can choose the ONLYOFFICE solution that best suits their existing infrastructure.

OnlyOffice self-hosted editors for integration with your learning platform

OnlyOffice publishers are already integrated with several services such as Moodle, the open source learning platform allowing teachers to create custom environments on their own servers. Recently, OnlyOffice has become one of the add-ons available in the Moodle application library. It is designed to allow students and faculty to collaborate on their online materials during lessons.

The other example is an integration with OpenOlat, the Swiss web-based education system. Thanks to OnlyOffice, users are able to create, edit and collaborate on their office documents directly from the platform interface.

New integrations are created by developers regularly. This is the case of the Université Grenoble Alpes, where OnlyOffice publishers have been added to the Chamilo platform.

To make this integration possible, the connector for Moodle served as an example:

“In the run-up to the health crisis, we decided to add the OnlyOffice suite to Chamilo to ensure the continuity of academic activities. The developers of the SUNIE service in charge of the educational platforms created the integration application based on the existing Moodle connector and the standard example proposed in the ‘Developer documentation’, explains Stéphanie Pudda, Head of the application suite within the SUNIE service at Grenoble Alpes University.

 

Secure document editing in Nextcloud and ownCloud

Teachers with collaborative environments based on storage and productivity platforms such as Nextcloud or ownCloud can also easily add editing and co-editing tools by integrating ONLYOFFICE editors.

This is the choice of the University of Nantes, whose collaborative space relies on Nextcloud for the storage of files on the institution’s servers and the OnlyOffice online suite for the collaborative drafting of text documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

‘One of ONLYOFFICE’s great strengths is that it does not overload the server. It is an HTML5 application, JavaScript that runs only in the browser. In this way, servers are less in demand and require less resources. The user interface was also considered very welcoming by our colleagues.” explains Matthieu Le Corre, Technical Manager of the Science Education Unit at the University of Nantes.

In addition to productivity tools, OnlyOffice publishers ensure security and GDPR compliance.

The University of Münster has implemented the OnlyOffice-ownCloud combo in their file sharing platform to offer collaborative features to researchers who manage sensitive data according to high security standards.

OnlyOffice easily integrates with other web services such as Seafile, Nuxeo, Plone, Confluence and Alfresco.

A complete office suite in self-hosting

Combo including online publishers and OnlyOffice productivity tools can be very useful for educational institutions that need a collaborative solution, but cannot use products offered by Microsoft and Google that do not allow self-hosting.

This solution includes a platform to store and manage documents, projects and emails, online editors of text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. It also offers a control panel to set up the web desktop and ensure data protection.

The self-hosted publishers integrated with a OnlyOffice collaboration platform were deployed by the Centre de Ressources Informatiques at the Institut de Biologie de Lille.

The ONLYOFFICE suite has become a tool we use on a daily basis. The portal allows us to centralise all the documents we need to produce in the performance of our duties. The tools for editing documents were welcomed both by their practicality and by their wealth of functionalities’, says Jérémy Maton, Systems and Networks Administrator at the Lille Institute of Biology.

OnlyOffice self-hosting solutions with discounts of up to 70% for schools and higher education institutions.

Free cloud office for schools

Schools and other institutions do not have their own IT infrastructure, can choose the OnlyOffice cloud. In terms of features this desktop space looks a lot like OnlyOffice Workspace, but can be easily launched just in a few clicks without any installation.  GDPR-compliant, the OnlyOffice cloud is completely free for schools. Universities and institutes benefit from discounts of up to 50%.

Useful links: The office suite website – OnlyOffice for Education

To go further: OnlyOffice also exists in the form of desktop applications to be installed on your computer.